Rules I Follow That Don’t Make Sense

The thing before you know the why - On instinct, trust, and why beauty that behaves puts me to sleep.

Every time I’ve tried, it comes out cleaner than it actually is — organized, defensible, something you could put in a deck. That version isn’t real. The real version is a mess of subconscious pattern-matching and memory and something that lands before I have any language for it at all.

Most of what I trust is a low-grade obsession. Not only an idea I’m excited about — more like something I can’t stop noticing. A shape that shows up wrong and keeps bothering me. A feeling I can’t make a case for. A color combo that I can’t stop seeing around. A quiet yes that arrives before I have a single reason to explain it.

I learned a long time ago that when I override those things — when I choose the more reasonable version — everything starts to look right and feel extremely wrong. The work is technically fine. It just doesn’t belong to me anymore. Or anyone for that matter.

I don’t trust beauty that behaves.

The first time I saw images from Juergen Teller — flash-heavy, uncorrected, skin that looked like actual skin and not a concept of skin — I felt something close to irritation and discomfort. It was wrong compared to everything I’d been taught to read as good and correct. Those early backstage photos from Helmut Lang shows broke something open in the way I was seeing. Not gently. Suddenly. And like a flood of discovery.

I couldn’t look away even if I wanted to. And the fact that I couldn’t look away while also feeling slightly confused by it — that was the thing. That friction is where I live now. And always hope to.

Anything too composed starts to feel like it’s hiding something. I’ve always been more drawn to work that looks like it might fall apart if you got too close. I remember watching the movie Kids for the first time — that sick, electric feeling of seeing something you weren’t supposed to be witnessing. I’ve never watched it again. I’ve never forgotten it either. Or Pipilotti Rist, that work feeling diaristic and reckless and completely, weirdly alive. That’s the register I’m always trying to find. Not the polished version. The one that almost annoyingly hums.

I try to follow what I can’t stop thinking about. Not what’s smart. For better or worse. Not what would work but maybe somehow might in a weird way. And when I feel myself drifting toward the polished world of things — the universally legible, the broadly appealing — I try to catch it. I don’t always. But I’m paying attention. And admittingly sometimes it can be fun. But not for too long.

The things that stay are inconvenient. Hard to explain without sounding a little unhinged. Even though I try to blame it on perimenopause brain fog.

I used to think speed meant clarity. That if something was right, it would move fast.

I don’t trust things that everyone agrees on, either. There’s a specific feeling I get when something has been sanded down enough to be universally liked. It’s not excitement. It’s a kind of dull silence. I’d rather something be slightly divisive. Slightly too much for some people. Polite approval is one of the fastest ways to kill something that was actually interesting.

I still think about being a teenager and flipping through i-D and not fully understanding what I was looking at — but knowing it wasn’t meant for everyone. Watching The Doom Generation late at night and feeling like I had stumbled into something I wasn’t ready for. That tension. That refusal to explain itself. I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since and I’m not sure I’d recognize the work if it didn’t have it somewhere inside.

I don’t tell people everything when I’m developing something. Partly because I’m interested in what happens before context arrives. I used to hand over or apply products I was making and testing in the wild or to people on set without saying what they were or that I made them. Just watching. The way someone’s face changes when they realize something feels good — or doesn’t. That moment before explanation is the most honest one. I trust it more than anything I could say out loud about what I’m making.

I pay attention to repulsion just as much as attraction. Repulsion is sharper. It defines edges. It tells me what I’m not willing to become. I think taste is built as much from rejection as from desire.

I’ve been close enough to versions of growth that didn’t feel like mine. More money. More scale. More presence. On paper it made sense. In my body it didn’t. And the body always knew first. Growth changes your days, your energy, the texture of everything — and it doesn’t only have to look one way. That’s something I had to learn slowly, and it cost something to learn it.

None of this translates cleanly. It doesn’t scale. It doesn’t belong in a strategy document. But it keeps the work alive. And that’s the only metric I’ve found that actually holds.